Danny Jordaan – from "coloured" footballer to World Cup main man World headlines

Danny Jordaan: the man with the footballing universe on his shoulders. Photograph: Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters

Danny Jordaan stood on the green, immature weed of the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, underneath a roof tiles representing a sunflower opening to bloom. "I was innate usually down the road," he said, "but I couldn"t come where we"re standing. This was personal as a white area."

During South Africa"s prolonged apartheid psychosis, Jordaan was personal "coloured" – a tenure probably most appropriate accepted as churned race, nonetheless socially and culturally unequivocally opposite from the approach Barack Obama is churned race.

David Smith on Danny Jordaan Link to this audio

He is right away the arch senior manager of the 2010 World Cup organising committee. "To mount here and think about my girl in those dim days, in a track that bears the name of one of the world"s good icons, is a mental condition come true," he said.

For a man with the footballing universe on his shoulders, Jordaan, 58, has an impressively serene, unrushed disposition. For sixteen years he has been operative to move the greatest singular sporting eventuality on the universe to Africa.

Three months from right away he contingency deliver, and it is he who will in conclusion be hold obliged for any hulk jump forward, or backward, in the approach Africa is seen around the world.

This maestro of the ransom onslaught knows improved than any one how politics, competition and competition are intertwined. A part of of Steve Biko"s anti-apartheid South African Students" Organisation in the sixties, he went on to stick on the South African Council on Sport, compelling the mantra "No normal sports for an aberrant society". The campaigns for South Africa to be diminished from ubiquitous sports federations, together with Fifa, probably helped spin white open opinion.

Jordaan, a former teacher, had a short spell as a veteran footballer but was denied the possibility to fool around for the South African inhabitant team. "Of march I couldn"t paint my country," he told me last year. "I was not regarded as a citizen. I voted for the initial time in my republic when I was 42 years old."

He became a informal boss of the African National Congress and served as an MP underneath Mandela. In 1997 he quiescent to turn arch senior manager of the South Africa Football Association. He led the narrowly catastrophic bid to host the 2006 World Cup but triumphed 4 years later.

Jordaan retains a amiable piety and charm. If he had a bruise for each time he"s been asked about crime in South Africa, he would be the richest man in the country, but he answers patiently. At the finish of press conferences he will mostly magnify a palm and a comfortable grin to journalists, and give the sense of receiving them in to his certainty but essentially vouchsafing anything slip.

I"ve usually outlayed five days following him with 130 alternative reporters around the 9 cities hosting the 2010 World Cup. We crossed the republic on franchised planes and coaches, were greeted at each airfield by normal African dancers and drummers and choirs of fans in football shirts and, at 7.30am in Cape Town, a coronet rope and statuesque cellist. Like a stately couple, Jordaan and Jerome Valcke, the Fifa ubiquitous secretary, were presented with a period of gifts together with flood dolls and vuvuzelas (a floating horn).

On day one we were taken to Ellis Park, Soccer City, Soweto and a precision venue, the refurbished Super Stadium. It"s in Atteridgeville, a municipality in Pretoria, and is no disbelief dictated to show us that bad South Africans unequivocally will good from this World Cup. And to be fair, 3 internal people I interviewed all voiced their await and pride.

During his revisit Jordaan was asked about the hazard to the World Cup acted by industrial action. His answer referred to that a little beliefs will never be abandoned. "What are we going to do about strikes? Nothing. Strikes in this republic are a hard-won approved right. We had strikes during the track building a whole and we didn"t try to stop them."

At the Free State Stadium in Bloemfontein, a fan asked Jordaan: "What will you give us in the hearts to show the young kids and grandchildren?" His reply: "We wish to grasp something that has never happened in the republic and continent for a hundred years. How will it hold your lives? Job origination and mercantile growth."

But as internal reports attest to his skills as a domestic user in South African football, Jordaan has a steel core. At a press discussion at the Royal Bafokeng track in Rustenburg, where England fool around their initial match, a South African publisher sprawled on the building and complained to a internal statesman that roadworks were unfinished. Jordaan seized the microphone and rebuked him: "You can"t distortion there and contend that to the premier when she can"t even see you." The publisher obediently stood up.

At the Mbombela Stadium in Nelspruit, I found myself trapped in a lift with 9 alternative reporters together with a sweating claustrophobe and "we"re using out of air!" comedian. We stumbled out to ask questions about the miserable state of the pitch: an dull dustbowl out of The Grapes of Wrath that was pecked at by birds.

A internal central had explained, during a debate of the stadium, that there had been dual catastrophic attempts to grow Fifa-quality grass. But a representation dilettante at the press discussion insisted there had usually been one failure. Who was right?

Jordaan was uncharacteristically brusque: "I should suggest you to make use of report from the specialist, not what you listened in the corridor.

"Who do you believe, a heart surgeon or a debate guide?" The guide, incidentally, was station in the room, and after stood by his story.

Jordaan has compared the onslaught to remonstrate the universe of South Africa"s credit as host republic with the onslaught opposite white minority rule. Everything is political, together with sport. But that might additionally desire questions not even he can answer.

On the unequivocally day he legalised the pretentious Cape Town Stadium in an abundant suburb in between the sea and Table Mountain, a consult was published display that half a million people in the city still have no entrance to simple sanitation.